Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns

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GRAND FORKS, N.D. — On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.






The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.

Credit...Dan Koeck for The New York Times






Aside from the missing persons mission, experts here outline a number of uses for the planes: “precision agriculture,” with tiny planes inspecting crops several times a week for the first sign of blight or insect invasion; safety missions by semiautonomous flying machines that could cruise the two-mile length of a freight train and examine the air brakes on each car, far faster than a person could, and be available for accident assessment in case of derailment; inspection operations of pipelines or power lines, a job that is notoriously dangerous for helicopters, and scouting out fires or car crashes.



Remote control equipment might even displace some human pilots, in the cockpits of cargo planes.



Equipped with a GPS sensor and a $220 autopilot, it can be programmed to fly to a sequence of coordinates, at various altitudes, much the way an airliner can. Or it can simply broadcast its position to a distant ground station, where an operator can use a computer keyboard and mouse, or a joystick, to direct it.



The rapid progress has driven a burst of commercial activity, along with a lot of anxiety. Mr. Regenhard was teamed up one recent afternoon with Mr. Becker, whose company had written a program that simulated a Cessna 182, a single-engine plane familiar to generations of student pilots, and was integrated with a variety of computer-drawn landscapes, some real, some artificial.

Among the software tricks, the terrain map on Mr. Regenhard’s screen showed a moving red cone, like a searchlight, that was sometimes broad and sometimes a pinpoint, indicating the field of view through the camera controlled by Mr. Becker, giving the pilot a good idea of what the sensor operator was looking at, and thus how to direct the plane.

As demonstrated here, the technology seems whiz-bang but unthreatening. The unmanned aerial systems include a ground station, usually a laptop with some communications gear attached, and some of the flying vehicles weigh only a few pounds. Even many of the larger ones will fit into molded cases that go comfortably into the trunk of a car. Some take off when the operator throws them, like a javelin or a football; some of the larger ones are intended to be launched from a catapult that could sit in the bed of a pickup truck.


Benjamin M. Trapnell, an associate professor and a mainstay of the unmanned aircraft systems program here, one of only three nationwide to offer a bachelor’s in the field, said the trick was not just in learning to fly such vehicles, but also in designing them, including the cameras or other sensors they could carry, and the ground stations from which they can be controlled.



